Losing his job was a blow to young Bob Keeshan, but that single event
forever changed children's television.

Keeshan
was out of work for nine months, a period that saw the former Marine unable
to pay his mortgage and resort to cashing in soda bottles for the pennies
they would bring in.
Needless to say, it was a stressful time for Keeshan, who had a pregnant
wife and an 18-month-old son at home.

"I
was about ready to go into the insurance business or whatever because
I had a young son and a daughter on the way,” Keeshan once told
me. "We were destitute. We were in dire straits."

Keeshan
and several other key cast members had been cut loose from the NBC TV
program "The Howdy Doody
Show" in June 1952. The group had hired an agent to
find them outside work, but the show's front-and-center star, "Buffalo
Bob" Smith, feared the agent had been brought in to negotiate higher
salaries and fired them. Until then, Keeshan had enjoyed job security
as Clarabell, the show's seltzer-spraying, horn-honking clown.

Suddenly
jobless, Keeshan found a potential lifeline in CBS, which proposed its
own program about a marionette boy named Billy Buttons. Keeshan and his
fired "Howdy Doody" castmates — Dayton Allen, Rhoda Mann
and Bill LeCornect — collaborated on the show. But CBS passed on
what Keeshan later called "a shameful rip-off of Howdy Doody."

Keeshan
had better luck at New York television station WABC, which wanted to copy
a successful lunchtime show in Chicago about a clown. "Time for Fun,"
with Keeshan again in clown makeup, ran for 18 months. His subsequent
show, "Tinker's Workshop," lasted another six months on
WABC with Keeshan in the title role as a toymaker.

"Tinker's
Workshop" attracted the attention of CBS, which asked Keeshan to
submit a pilot for a possible morning series targeted to children. The
now-familiar series became "Captain Kangaroo."

But this
isn't about Captain Kangaroo. It's about the people who passed through
the doors of the captain's Treasure House, among them David Connell, Jon
Stone, Sam Gibbon, Jeff Moss and Clark "Corky" Gesner. These
men educated the next generation of children, the ones raised on "Sesame
Street" and "The Electric Company." One even left his mark
on the theater.

The
magazine Entertainment Weekly in 1999 polled its readers and
asked their opinion on the best children's program. "Sesame Street"
was No. 1, with 30 percent of the votes. "Captain Kangaroo"
came in second, with 16 percent. The results may be explained away in
part because "Captain Kangaroo" left the air in 1984 while "Sesame
Street" continues to run on PBS.

Ironically,
without "Captain Kangaroo,"
there would be no "Sesame Street." Connell, Stone, Gibbon and
Moss all made their way from the Treasure House to 123 Sesame Street.

"Bob
Keeshan deserves all kinds of credit for ‘Sesame Street,'"
Joan Ganz Cooney, the originator of "Sesame Street," is quoted
as saying in Phylis Feinstein's 1971 book "All About Sesame Street."
"He built extraordinary talent and although his turnover rate is
not high at all, most of the guys who have been very interested in high
quality children's television have passed through his show."

When
Cooney looked around at how television was reaching out to children in
the late 1960s, she found that "Captain Kangaroo" was the only
daily network show for children. That was still true a decade later, and
she urged PBS stations not to air "Sesame Street" opposite "Captain
Kangaroo." But by 1990, Cooney's earlier gratitude toward Keeshan's
contribution had waned. She said that year: "I have great respect
for him, but he used to say my show was good because we hired former Captain
Kangaroo personnel. He certainly was the only beacon in children's television
for many years, and we got some very talented people from him, but his
work didn't spawn us."

However
you slice the credit for "Sesame Street," there's little doubt
that these extremely talented people who would go on to create the show
first put their skills to work on the set of "Captain Kangaroo."

"We
were all trained on Kangaroo," said Sam Gibbon, a key figure at Children's
Television Workshop who would be instrumental in the creation of "The
Electric Company." "Our attitudes were established. Our production
skills. Our writing skills. Everything. We went to school on ‘Captain
Kangaroo.'"

"None
of our people are ever out of work," Keeshan once said. "It's
great training. There's no other show I know of in television that can
take a production assistant and teach him everything — because we
do everything here. We do everything in a technical sense; we do everything
in a program sense. We're a variety show with guest stars, we do some
dramatic scenes, there's always some comedy — and in the technical
department, with visual material and film, and trick-shot effects, a production
assistant gets to learn to work on everything that's available in the
medium."

In
a similar vein, Keeshan confessed a debt to "Buffalo Bob" for
teaching him about television, specifically the technical aspects and
the importance of timing. The philosophies between "Howdy Doody"
and "Captain Kangaroo" were worlds apart. "I had a very
different philosophy of children's programming," Keeshan once said.
"Less aggressive, less of the Punch and Judy, pie-in-the-face approach."

David
Connell was among the early staff members on "Captain Kangaroo,"
which first hit the airwaves in October 1955. He joined the show in January
1956, after earning his master's degree in television from the University
of Michigan.

"I
was ready to become the next John Frankenheimer," Connell told Jeff
Kisseloff for the book "The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961."
"Instead, I got a job on this kiddie show. For six weeks I was a
clerk. My first job was to forge Keeshan's name on postcards when
fans sent in letters. He found me doing it and put an end to it. Then
I just hung around for a while until a production assistant job opened
up and I took it."

He admitted
to Kisseloff he thought the show was "sloppy" and the directing
"bad. Everything was bad, but it didn't matter. It worked."

A little
more than two years after joining "Captain Kangaroo," Connell
was producing the show. He became executive producer in 1960, and remained
with Keeshan until 1966, when he left to a join a company making industrial
films.

"I
was extremely happy for the first time in 10 years," Connell once
said. "I was in the film business and quite independent, really liked
it a lot."

His foray
beyond children's television didn't last long. Cooney wanted
him to oversee what would become "Sesame Street." But Connell
wasn't eager to return to television, particularly to work on a
show that was going to rely on a team of educational advisers. He'd
also never heard of Cooney, whose background was in making documentaries
for a New York TV station.

"I
left ‘Kangaroo' because I'd been with the show for 12
years and producing it for nine," Connell told The New York Times,
"and I was at an age and a stage where I thought that if I was going
to do something else, I'd better move on. But I was discouraged
enough about the direction of children's television that I didn't
care if I ever did it again."

Michael
Dann, then the programming boss at CBS, had recommended Cooney talk to
Connell, telling her she needed a veteran producer in charge. Dann hadn't
met Cooney yet, but when news broke of her plans to create this educational
program, he wrote her a letter: "You are faced with a very serious
problem — whom are you going to select as your executive producer?
You are going to make a terrible mistake if you don't go for a guy who
has had some experience in volume producing." Dann himself would
later quit CBS and become Cooney's assistant and vice president of Children's
Television Workshop.

During
four lengthy conversations, Cooney and Connell spelled out their desires
for this unnamed program. Cooney wanted the show to have a multi-racial
cast, no stars, feature both men and women and rely on "commercials"
to teach children about letters and numbers. She wanted the show to be
a series of short segments, similar to "Laugh-In," the enormously
popular and irreverent show of the day.

Cooney
was sold. He joined her effort in 1968. "It's hard to imagine
‘Sesame Street' without his leadership of the creative team,"
Cooney once said.

Connell's
lasting concern was he wanted to see experienced people from the world
of commercial television put in charge of production. "I felt that,
since we were talking about television production, the ultimate decision
about what goes on the air has to remain with the producers," he
once said, "and that if it had to be run by an academic advisory
board, there was the risk of disaster, that there would be educators playing
producers. If we were going to err, it must be on the side of entertainment,
not education."

He didn't
have far to look to find the people with whom he wanted to work. Connell
contacted his friends from "Captain Kangaroo." He hired Sam
Gibbon and Jon Stone. "Together with Connell," James Day wrote
in his book The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television,
"they formed the nucleus of what was to become one of the most imaginative
and remarkable production teams in children's television."

Like
Connell, Stone initially was reluctant to join the educational television
show. He had left "Captain Kangaroo" and was living a quieter
life in Vermont, intending to take up farming or some other noble pursuit.
He didn't want to do television; he was tired of it. But he agreed
at last to join Connell. Stone, who earned a master's degree in
drama from Yale and once dreamed of becoming an actor, wound up directing
the show for the next quarter-century, winning 18 Emmy Awards in the process.
Gibbon also didn't want the job. He already had waved away Cooney
when she first asked him to join Children's Television Workshop.

"I'd
had it with children's television," said Gibbon, who started at CBS
and "Captain Kangaroo" as a production assistant. He had an
English degree from Princeton, experience as a "terrible actor"
in the Army touring Germany during the Korean War and an interest in children's
theater. "I wanted to do something else. I'd really burned out after
six and a half years on ‘Captain Kangaroo.' Then Martin Luther King
was assassinated and it seemed like maybe this show that proposed to do
something for poor inner-city kids — minority kids in particular
— it was time to do something like that. So I called up and I said,
'I'm in.'"

The contributions
each man made in the early days of the Children's Television Workshop
were key. For instance, Connell picked the name from a list he'd
asked children at a Manhattan day care center to suggest. "Almost
everybody on the staff, I think, came in with the memo, looked at it and
said, ‘Sesame Street? Yuk!'" Connell once said. "But
nobody came up with anything else. So it won by default."

Connell
also was instrumental in the casting. He auditioned and hired a college
friend named Bob McGrath, who had been working on the TV show "Sing
Along with Mitch," to play the role of a neighbor on Sesame Street.
Connell also grappled with the right person to play Gordon, another neighbor,
until he convinced fellow producer Matt Robinson to try out for the part.
Robinson did, won the role and portrayed Gordon for the first three seasons.

Connell's
knack for picking the right person proved invaluable. Take the case of
Jon Stone. A series of meetings with educators had helped shape the content
of what "Sesame Street" would try to teach its audience, but
that still left big questions about the format of the show. Stone had
plenty of ideas.

"Jon
wanted it to be set on an inner-city street," Gibbon recalled. "He
wanted it to be interracial as possible. He wanted it to deal with the
issues of being a poor kid in the inner city. Then there were others who
were uncomfortable with that sort of down-beat quality of that description
and wanted something a little bit closer to ‘Captain Kangaroo,'
in fact, and that's an island of safety feeling."

Stone,
Gibbon said, "was bitterly opposed" to emulating "Captain
Kangaroo," where the show was contained to the magical Treasure House
and the yard beyond where Mr. Green Jeans showed off the animals.

"It
seemed to me that a street in an urban run-down area would give the children
we were most interested in reaching a neighborhood to identify with,"
Stone once told The New York Times.

It was
Stone who brought Jim Henson's Muppets into the picture. Stone and
Henson had worked together on the 1969 ABC special "Hey Cinderella,"
which Stone co-wrote and Henson directed.
"Jon had worked with Jim and knew him well, and had said at one point
if we're going to have puppets on the show, let's get Jim
Henson," Gibbon said. The Muppets had appeared many times on Ed Sullivan's
show and in a series of commercials for coffee. For Stone, the choice
was using Henson's Muppets or scrapping the idea of including puppets
completely.

Stone
used the Muppets in a comical film to promote the then-unnamed show in
which the Muppets suggested what to call it. One Muppet proposed calling
it simply "Hey, Stupid!"

Initially,
producers of "Sesame Street" erred on the side of realism. The
now-familiar Muppets — Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, Bert and Ernie
— were to be used between segments on the street rather than being
integrated with the human cast. But early screenings before audiences
of children showed that the kids were more interested when animated bits
or the Muppets were on screen. "So it turned into a street where
Oscar can come out of a trash can or Big Bird can come wandering by,"
Connell once said.

But not
everyone thought Stone's approach to the show was the right one.
Clark Gesner, who started as a cue card holder on "Captain Kangaroo,"
didn't work for Children's Television Workshop. He attended
some seminars and Connell and Gibbon briefed him on the ones he missed.
Shown the direction "Sesame Street" was heading, Gesner was
"horrified," Gibbon recalled. "He hated it and wanted to
do something very different."

Gesner
had learned to make himself heard since his early days on "Captain
Kangaroo." Keeshan once wrote about him: "One evening in the
early years of the show, Clark ‘Corky' Gesner, always soft
spoken, approached me somewhat tentatively and pressed a large envelope
on me. He explained that he had written some songs and would be pleased
if I could find time to give them a listen. Oh boy, thought I, how am
I going to let this kid down easily? I listened to his tapes that evening
and was enthralled." Keeshan recognized Gesner's talent and
put him to work writing and composing. In his free time, Gesner wrote
songs inspired by the Peanuts comic strip, eventually turning them into
the hit musical "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown."

For "Sesame
Street," Gesner had a vastly different idea from what Stone was proposing.
Connell heard him out, and gave Gesner a budget to produce his ideal version
of the show. Gesner returned with a 20-minute sample that Gibbon recalled
was "quite abstract." The performers were abstract objects or
humanoid in appearance. The setting was a series of nooks and crannies,
"the opposite of the realistic inner-city street setting that ‘Sesame
Street' had opted for."

Connell's
investment in Gesner's idea wasn't wasted. Children's Television Workshop
wound up using pieces from Gesner's prototype, chiefly sequences of dots
popping onto the screen in sync with music. Typically a rebellious dot
would ignore what the other dots were doing and do its own thing.

Left
behind on the set of "Captain Kangaroo," Keeshan later would
profess no bitterness at the exodus of his staff. "People have got
to do their thing," he once told me.

In
fact, Keeshan praised Connell, Stone and Gibbon in his memoir "Good
Morning, Captain." He wrote that Connell and Stone "had the
highest standards of production and an unshakable belief in influencing
children with the best in programming." About Gibbon, Keeshan wrote:
"Sam is a natural leader, thoughtful, creative, and with a keen insight
into the needs of young people and how to meet those needs."

"He
was not the easiest person to work with," Gibbon said about Keeshan.
"But he was an extremely generous employer. He valued the staff.
He treated them well. The most remarkable thing is he would never ever
compromise his position with children. He knew what kind of authority
he had. He knew what kinds of fantasy worlds children constructed around
him and the puppets. He wouldn't take advantage of the power he had with
kids. At a time when the sales department wanted to cancel the program
because it wasn't making enough money and the ‘Today Show' was cleaning
up in audience ratings, Keeshan would refuse to do commercials he didn't
like. G.I. Joe war toys, he simply would not allow to be on the program."

Gibbon
said the biggest lesson everyone learned from working on the show was
that Keeshan truly cared about children.
The Treasure House served as a training ground for people with a similar
interest in children. It was only natural that so many wound up at Children's
Television Workshop.

Jeff
Moss, who initially worked for Keeshan as a production assistant, followed
that path. A native New Yorker and a graduate of Princeton, Moss picked
the "Captain Kangaroo" job over the same duties at CBS News.

"I
was being very young and flip," Moss told Terry Gross on her radio
show Fresh Air in 1994. "I said, well, I've seen the news.
I hadn't seen ‘Kangaroo.' There's where I ended up."

Moss
started as a production assistant, then returned as a writer after a six-month
stint in the Army. The son of a Shakespearean actor father and a writer
mother, Moss grew up listening to classical music and Broadway show tunes
and writing songs to entertain his friends. Among his contributions to
"Captain Kangaroo" was the song "When Ping Pong Balls Are
Falling."
That just shows, Gibbon said, how "Captain Kangaroo" worked.
Everyone was free to contribute to all aspects of the show.

"You
couldn't work on that show without being involved with everything on 'Kangaroo,'"
Gibbon said. "There were weekly theme meetings in which all the writers,
all the cast, the producers all met together to decide on a theme for
a show. And then to elaborate on a theme with suggestions for music, suggestions
for productions of music, suggestions for sketches. Everybody contributed
to these theme meetings. It was one of the things that sort of infused
the seminars on 'Sesame Street.'

This
sounds a little strange because on 'Kangaroo' the educational ambitions
were minimal. There were educational exhibits and things like that, but
it was very gentle education. It certainly wasn't curriculum dominated.
But the notion that everybody could have a good idea was the idea of the
seminars."

Moss'
contribution was to the sound of "Sesame Street." Early episodes
relied on using records instead of original music. With Joe Raposo, the
first music director of the show, that all changed.

"Joe
came to me and said, 'Well, look, you write words and music. I write words
and music. Why don't we just do it? We'll write to the curriculum. We'll
do it faster'," Moss told Gross on Fresh Air. "Joe
was wonderfully ebullient. He said, 'We'll do it better, let's just go
do it.' And we did it."

Moss
and Raposo put their stamp on "Sesame Street" from the beginning,
collaborating on the now-famous theme song. Raposo would go to write,
among songs, "Sing," "C is for Cookie" and "It's
Not Easy Being Green." Moss' "Sesame Street" credits include
"People in Your Neighborhood," "I Love Trash" and
"Rubber Duckie." That's Moss heard squeaking a toy duck in the
recording.

Moss
wrote a dozen "Sesame Street" books and three volumes of poetry
for children. He made other contributions as well. Henson was going to
call a furry blue Muppet Boggle Eyes until Moss suggested Cookie Monster
was a better name. Moss would go on to win 14 Emmy Awards for his work
on the show, and two Grammy Awards. He even collected an Oscar nomination
for the 1984 movie "The Muppets Take Manhattan."

"I
know it sounds slightly naive, but we wanted to make it as good as we
could, and we were having such a good time working so hard," Moss
once said. "It was a very, very small group when we started and I
don't think of any of us thought this would be our life's work. We believed
in what we were doing, but we had no idea how much we could change the
world."

Sadly,
these creative men who helped launch "Sesame Street" died too
soon. Of the original team, only Cooney and Gibbon are still alive.

Raposo
died of lymphoma in 1989, when he was just 51 years old. A bacterial infection
caused the death of Henson in 1990, at age 53. Connell was 64 when he
died in 1995. Stone died in 1997 at age 65 of complications from Lou Gehrig's
disease. Moss died in 1998 of colon cancer. He was 56. Gesner suffered
a heart attack and died in 2002 at the age of 64.

And
Keeshan, the man who started it all? He died in 2004 at age 76 following
a lengthy illness.